19 Reported Dead as Pakistanis Protest Muhammad Video

Protesters set a cinema ablaze on Friday in Peshawar, Pakistan. Violence there began early, and two people, including a television station employee, were killed.Credit
Mohammad Sajjad/Associated Press

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Violent crowds furious over an anti-Islamic video made in the United States convulsed Pakistan’s largest cities on Friday, leaving up to 19 people dead and more than 160 injured in a day of government-sanctioned protests.

It was the worst single day of violence in a Muslim country over the video, “Innocence of Muslims,” since protests began nearly two weeks ago in Egypt, before spreading to two dozen countries. Protesters have ignored the United States government’s denunciation of the video.

Peaceful protests had been approved by Pakistan’s government, which declared Friday a national holiday, the Day of Love for the Prophet Muhammad. The move was part of an effort to either control or politically capitalize on rage against the inflammatory video, which depicts Muhammad, the founder of Islam, as a sexually perverted buffoon.

Friday’s violence began with the fatal shooting of a television station employee during a protest in the northwestern city of Peshawar, and was amplified through armed protests in the southern port city of Karachi that left 12 to 14 people dead, Pakistani news media reported.

In Bangladesh, several thousand Islamist activists took to the streets of the capital, Dhaka, waving banners and burning a symbolic coffin for President Obama that was covered with the American flag. “Death to the United States and death to French,” they chanted.

Local television networks reported that a mob had ransacked and burned an Anglican church in Mardan in northwestern Pakistan. There were no reports that Christians had been killed or wounded.

In Tunisia, the government invoked emergency powers to outlaw all demonstrations, and American diplomatic posts in India, Indonesia and elsewhere closed for the day.

France closed embassies and other institutions in 20 countries while, in Paris, some Muslim leaders urged their followers to heed a government ban on weekend demonstrations.

In Pakistan, the streets started erupting early in Peshawar, where protesters burned two movie theaters. Two people, including the television employee, Muhammad Amir, were killed.

Mr. Amir’s employer televised graphic footage of hospital staff members as they gave him emergency treatment shortly before he died, a broadcast that other Pakistani journalists condemned as insensitive and irresponsible.

Some protesters tried to reach the city’s heavily guarded American Consulate, which has a strong Central Intelligence Agency component. By evening, hospital officials said, at least five people were dead and more than 50 wounded.

After Friday Prayer, more severe violence erupted in Islamabad, Lahore, Rawalpindi, Multan and Karachi, where normally bustling streets were instead filled with clouds of tear gas and the sound of gunfire.

Protesters in Karachi burned effigies, stoned a KFC and engaged in armed clashes with the police that left 14 people dead and more than 80 wounded by evening.

“An attack on the holy prophet is an attack on the core belief of 1.5 billion Muslims,” Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf said in an address at a religious conference Friday morning in Islamabad. “Therefore, this is something that is unacceptable.”

Mr. Ashraf called on the United Nations and the international community to formulate a law outlawing hate speech across the world. “Blasphemy of the kind witnessed in this case is nothing short of hate speech, equal to the worst kind of anti-Semitism or other kind of bigotry,” he said.

But chaotic scenes in the streets outside suggested that if the government had aimed to harness public anger on the issue, it had failed.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

In contrast, the day passed peacefully in neighboring Afghanistan, where officials had been preparing for the protests for days. Clerics at major mosques in the capital, Kabul, acceded to official requests that they preach peace, or another topic entirely. Police officers set checkpoints to search cars, and no street violence occurred.

A senior American official in Kabul said his Afghan counterparts had worked hard to mute the impact of the video through the week. That was, in part, a product of their previous experience with what he called “a desecration or religious event.”

In Pakistan, however, extremist groups, many banned by the government, were at the forefront of the upheavals. Marchers in Karachi included members of Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan, a banned Sunni sectarian group; Harkat-ul-Mujahedeen, which has fought India in Kashmir; and Tehrik-e-Ghalba Islami, a faction of another sectarian group.

In Islamabad, activists with Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan led a march toward the heavily guarded diplomatic enclave, where Western missions had closed for the day. They clashed for hours with the police outside the Serena Hotel before being pushed back.

In Lahore, activists from the banned Lashkar-e-Taiba, whose leader, Hafiz Saeed, is subject to a $10 million United States government bounty, led protesters toward the American Consulate, where perimeter defenses were breached earlier in the week.

The devastation caused by the protests belied their relatively small size. The largest street crowds were estimated to have 5,000 to 10,000 people, fewer than would typically attend a mainstream political rally.

Instead most Pakistanis drifted home after Friday Prayer, apparently keen to avoid the trouble. Still, many analysts questioned the government’s decision to give free rein to the marchers.

“Pakistan is a conservative but not a radicalized society,” said Cyril Almeida, a writer with the English-language newspaper Dawn. “But when the radical fringe is bold enough, it can hold society hostage. And that’s what happened today.”

The government tried to control the momentum of unrest by cutting off cellphone coverage in large cities for most of the day, and in Islamabad, it sealed exits in the city after Friday Prayer.

Imran Khan, the cricket star turned conservative politician, addressed one of the Islamabad protest rallies and condemned American drone strikes in the northwestern tribal belt. “There is no end to this war,” he said.

The State Department spent $70,000 on Urdu-language advertisements that were broadcast on several television channels, dissociating the United States government from the video.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs summoned the American chargé d’affaires, Richard E. Hoagland, and requested that he have “Innocence of Muslims” removed from YouTube. YouTube had already been entirely blocked in Pakistan for several days.

In a statement, Mr. Hoagland said he had told Pakistani officials that the video represented “a deeply insensitive decision by a single individual to disseminate hatred” and did not reflect American values.

The protests largely abated by nightfall, allowing main roads in most cities to reopen. The government expressed some frustration at the day’s events.

“What kind of a love for the prophet is this where people are burning and looting?” said Qamar Zaman Kaira, the information minister, in a television interview, before berating the news media for giving excessive coverage to the trouble. “You should stop giving live coverage of protests,” he said.

A version of this article appears in print on September 22, 2012, on Page A9 of the New York edition with the headline: Deadly Violence Erupts in Pakistan on a Day Reserved for Peaceful Protests. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe